Welcome to the film-related musings, complaints, and comments of Zack Clopton, an amateur film-critic, scholar, and screenwriter. Featured here are Director's Report Cards, essays, and other reviews. Enjoy!
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Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were confident in their plan to rush out a movie suspiciously similar to “Rambo: First Blood Part II” six whole months before the soon-to-be blockbuster was released. So confident, in fact, that they decided to double-down and get two “Rambo” knock-offs in theaters before Sylvester Stallone donned his red bandana again. “Missing in Action” and its sequel would be filmed back-to-back. The first film would depict Colonel Braddock's escape from the Vietnamese P.O.W. camp back in early seventies. The second would show him going back, in the present day, and rescuing the men who were left behind. Lance Hool would direct the first and Joseph Zito would direct the second. Upon getting a look at the finished movies, however, Golan and Globus decided the intended sequel was better than the original. Probably because it was more directly imitative of “Rambo” and had more explosions. To resolve any confusion, they simply flipped the titles. Zito's “Missing in Action” became the first film. Hool's became “Missing in Action 2: The Beginning,” the subtitle presumably added to clarify to audiences that this was a prequel.
In the summer of 1972, Colonel James Braddock and his team would be deployed via helicopter into the jungles of Vietnam. Their mission to offer support to pinned down U.S. forces would go horribly wrong. The helicopter was shot down. Braddock and his men – Captain Nester, Lieutenant Mazilli, Corporal Opelka, and Master Sergeant Franklin – are captured by the North Vietnamese army. They spend the next two years under the brutal supervision of Colonel Yin, who delights in physically and psychologically torturing the Americans. The men are not let free as Yin schemes to get Braddock to sign a bogus confession admitting to war crimes, which he refuses to do. As the situation grows graver and men begin to die, Braddock makes his own move to escape the prison camp, free his men, and take Yin down himself.
“Missing in Action” was, of course, ridiculous agitprop designed to make American audiences hoot and cheer as revenge is taken against those nasty Vietnamese who so bruised our national ego back in 1975. Its Vietnamese characters were mostly villains, two-dimensional bad guys for our patriotic hero to vanquish. Having seen “The Beginning,” I'm surprised to say that Zito's sequel actually toned down the propagandist xenophobia of Hool's work. The North Vietnamese forces in “Missing in Action II” are depicted as almost inhuman in their sadism. Men are strung up and stabbed with knives, beaten on the regular, and kept in cages deep in the ground. They are forced to fight for their captives' amusement or stripped naked and paraded before mocking prostitutes. A notable moment has Norris hung upside down while a bag containing a starved rat is placed over his face. The torment is not merely physical. Yin regularly plays a “game” with the prisoners, in which he places a gun to their heads and pulls the trigger, only to reveal that the pistol is unloaded. He tells the boys that America has already lost the war, that no one is coming to save them. He informs Braddock that he's been declared dead and his wife has already remarried. When Franklin becomes deathly ill with malaria, his friends are told he's being injected with drugs to keep him alive when it's actually a fatal dose of opium. If that wasn't bad enough, Yin then kills Mazilli's pet chicken and hands him the dead bird.
All throughout, Yin dangles the possibility of freedom before Braddock, as long as he signs that paper admitting to bogus war crimes against the Vietnamese. The warden claims that Braddock and his men have been kept here as long as they have because they are not prisoners of war but rather criminals. History, of course, tells us that the United States armed forces did inflict horrible war crimes against non-combatants in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese and the Viet-Cong did horrible things too, mostly to the South Vietnamese. All of this is a matter of public record. War is not a children's game, where one side is good and the other is bad. Exploitation films like “Missing in Action II” hope to drive ticket sales by playing on the audience's emotions. Obviously, Americans want to see themselves as the heroes, the victims of hideous atrocities and never the perpetrators of it. By depicting the Vietnamese forces as such brutally evil people, who then have the gull to falsely accuse the Americans of being just as bad, is to further facilitate ugly cheers and whoops in 42nd Street theaters and anywhere else.
The result is a motion picture with a real malicious energy flowing through it. An early scene has an failed escape attempt ending with an American set on fire via flamethrower, his suffering lingered on. Later, when Braddock gets his hand on the same device, he turns the flame on the Vietnamese in a similarly ruthless fashion. The torture scenes and gladiatorial combat are not merely bloody but brutal too. Since this is a war movie, there's little guarantee that anyone will survive these events. Whenever a bit of hope is dangled before the P.O.W.s – a helicopter appearing overhead or an Australian photographer appearing and claiming to be from a human rights organization – it inevitably ends badly. Honestly, out of the first two "Missing in Action" films, if I had to guess which one was made by a horror movie specialist, I would assume it was this one.
"Rambo: First Blood Part II" turned its nationalistic rage against the Vietnamese into over-the-top camp, difficult to take seriously as anything but comic book theatricality. "Missing in Action" aims for something grittier and uglier. So why watch the prequel then? First off, "The Beginning" feels like one of those fifties Men's Adventures pulp story, in its focus on physical agony, tough men in tougher situations, and racist caricatures as villains. There is a cultural context to be gleamed from this motion picture, in other words. It also, eventually, does become an entertaining action movie in its own right. Once Braddock escapes the camp and turns the tide on his captives, this becomes a fast-paced enough flick with some solid stunts from Norris and some pyrotechnics. While Zito's "Missing in Action" mostly limits its star's karate abilities, "The Beginning" smartly climaxes with a one-on-one showdown between Braddock and Yin. It's a very good fight, maybe the best of Norris' whole film career up to this point. Moreover, after watching an entire movie of Colonel Yin being so wicked towards everyone, watching him get beat up is quite satisfying. It helps that Yin played with an impressively vicious glee by Soon-tek Oh, making a fine villain.
I commented in my review of the first "Missing in Action" that it seemed to feature Chuck Norris evolving into an actually semi-decent actor. Knowing that "The Beginning" was shot first reveals this as the movie where Norris finally started to put some non-kicking/non-punching skills behind his movies. Supposedly, Chuck thought about his brother's death during the scene where Braddock is forced to watch one of his men die, the martial artist actually employing a bit of what you might call the Method there. Lool manages to get a surprising degree of pathos out of Norris' eyes during the many shots of them peering through the bars of his prison. There is a sense of camaraderie between the ensemble here. None of the guys are developed much beyond one or two characteristics – Cosie Costa probably does the best as Mazilli – but you do get the feeling that they all care about each other.
"Missing in Action 2" is a hard movie to defend, in many ways. It's a fairly ugly exploitation movie, not only in terms of content but also in the real sense of rage it directs towards its villains. Villains very much meant to stand-in for an entire nation of people, or at least their military forces. The movie represents some very sour grapes from the world's super power, demonizing its enemies and then executing them. At the same time, it's well-made, ultimately becoming quite efficient in getting the intended reaction out of the viewer. It also happens to feature some pretty bad-ass Chuck Norris stuff, the reason we watch these movies after all. It's certainly a much more interesting film than the prior "Missing in Action," which was less memorable in terms of action and not as compelling in its pacing. Being a fan of action movies means liking some ethically dubious shit some times, which is the feeling I have as I give "Missing in Action 2" a positive final score. [7/10]
[THE CHUCK OF NORRIS: 5 outta 5] [X] Facial Hair [X] Jumps or Kicks Through a Window or Wall [X] Performs Spin Kick or Spin Punch to Enemy's Face [X] Shows Off His Hairy Chest [X] Sports Some Cowboy Getup
I knew a guy who was a prison guard. Any time he would tell me stories from his job, it always sounded like a real fucked-up gig to me. From my view on the outside, it sounded like the entire system was designed to breed animosity between the guards and the inmates. That violence was inevitably chosen to be the first and only solution to most problems. He got the shit beat out of him all the time too, so the entire system was fucked. I said to him once that I thought corruption was present in every layer of American justice and that the prison system needed to be completely overhauled, with a focus towards rehabilitation and not “punishment.” He agreed with me and this guy never agreed with me on anything, so that should tell you something about the self-evident flaws in the corrections industry. I don't know where my state ranks country-wide in terms of prison shittiness but I was also not surprised to hear that Alabama's prisons are especially bad. This is the starting point of “The Alabama Solution,” another Oscar-nominated documentary about clear and evident injustices in this country of mine.
Cell phones are strictly forbidden among the inmates in U.S. prison. This has not stopped them from becoming among the most common of contraband behind bars. The proliferation of cell phones has allowed prisoners to record an unfiltered and honest documentation of what their lives are like. “The Alabama Solution” began to take shape when, while filming an outdoor barbecue at Easterling Correctional Facility in Barbour County, Alabama, prisoners covertly approached directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman with accounts of abuse from staff and unsanitary conditions. The murder of Steven Davis, beaten to death by guards, and the movement from his mother, Sandy Ray, to find the truth is also a prominent bullet note in the film. Eventually, the focus turns to the Free Alabama Movement, a peaceful activism group driven by inmates to call attention to their own mistreatment and lead to proper government oversight of Alabama's prisons. Naturally, those in power – including governor Kay Ivey, who gives the film its title by insisting that “Alabama problems require Alabama solutions” – do what they can to dismantle the protests.
The backbone of “The Alabama Solution” is that cell phone footage of life inside the prisons. Jarecki and Kaufman maintain all the video errors, the skips in audio and footage, leaving little doubt about what we are seeing is largely unedited. The film doesn't show me much of anything I couldn't have guessed about prison life. That doesn't mean some of these images aren't shocking. We see people sleeping on floors. Drug addicted inmates collapse in public spaces, their arms blacken and rotted with injection wounds. Blood is left splattered from beatings. We see Steven Davis' body in the immediate aftermath of his murder, his face so bruised from the brutal beating that nearly his entire face is blackened. Weirdly, that's not the moment that grossed me out the most. Instead, it was when a scene where an inmate says that he can't leave any food in his cell for fear of rats eating it... Before revealing a home-made mouse trap made of a water bottle with two live rats squirming around inside it. I mean, Jesus.
Not that things would have to be any worst than that to make “The Alabama Solution” upsetting. However, the film prepares more than enough material beyond the violent abuse and filthy conditions to prove how fucked-up Alabama's prisons – and, by extension, all American prisons – are. Once again, the fact of the matter that inmates are used as essentially slave labor by both the state and major corporations is examined. A notable moment sees a man working in a laundry department, saying he's been in prison for thirty years, has worked every day, and never gotten a single dollar in all that time. A pointed statement has the state's governor saying she doesn't want to be around prisoners before it's casually dropped that inmates being paid two dollars a day built her fuckin' mansion.
Proving that all of justice bends towards workers' rights, the Free Alabama Movement uses a workers' strike to demand change. The system's response is to cut the amount of food the inmates are fed, literally starving the movement to death. This is such a disgustingly immoral response that my brain immediately goes “why isn't that illegal?” before remembering that laws don't apply to social institutions that get to make the laws. We hear talk radio house make demeaning, dehumanizing comments about prisoners. Governor Ivey's solution is to consolidate Alabama's prisons into three mega-facilities, saying that it'll save the state money. Guess what project ends up going wildly over-budget before the end? It's always the same thing. When the repressed class realize they actually have the numbers on their side, those in power resort to systematically starving them of options and distracting the public with a bunch of stupid bullshit.
Sorry, I know this wasn't my most coherent review. I don't have a lot of deeper thoughts about “The Alabama Solution” other than to say, over and over again, how much this kind of stuff pisses me off. I suppose the film's ability to prompt such a viscerally emotional reaction to these social injustices is an example of its success. Simply pointing a cell phone camera at these horrible abuses of power and bringing them to light makes it so evident how wrong this shit is. So I'll just wrap this up by once again asking the two people reading this to please donate to the Free Alabama Movement, or whatever the closest local equivalent is for, if you can. I don't know how to fix any of this shit but, if I can buy a striking inmate lunch for a day, that's better than nothing. [7/10]
I joke and say that the eighties is when one-off horror hits become on-going horror franchises. However, we have to examine if this is exactly true. It's not like “The Burning” or “Madman” spawned long-running series. In the late eighties and early nineties, however, a concentrated effort was made to transform fluke indie successes into video store empires. This is the time when suddenly the Angelas, Pumpkinhead, Pinhead, He Who Walks Behind the Rows, Xtro, some werewolves that howl, and whatever the “Witchcraft” movies are about had multiple titles to their names. Perhaps everyone was eager to fill the hole left in the public's heart after Jason and Freddy burned themselves out. Up next was the Warlock, whose first movie must've been a hit for TriMark. After directing “Waxwork II” and “Hellraiser III,” Anthony Hickox would be recruited to turn Julian Sands' stylish, sexually ambiguous, time-traveling he-witch into the next Michael Myers.
Sands' presence as a pretty boy demon-spawn with magical powers is, in fact, the only connecting fiber between “Warlock” and “Warlock: The Armageddon.” The second film instead focuses on an ancient druidic tribe who have sworn to stop the off-spring of Satan from bringing about the end of the world. In the modern day, only a handful of followers survive. Teenage lovers, Kenny and Samantha, are unaware of their destiny as the last in this bloodline. The six rune stones capable of summoning the Devil to Earth have been spread across the country. During a lunar eclipse, the foretold return of the Warlock arrives, reborn as a slimy monster before becoming a man again. He sets out on a road trip to gather the other stones. Kenny's father murders him before bringing him back to life, a necessary step to awaken his magical powers. His elders give him all of six days to train and master the ways of Druid magic before the Warlock arrives in town and attempts to summon his add.
While the first “Warlock” had a magical MacGuffin, in the form of the Grand Grimoire, this was merely an excuse to send our two lovable heroes and charismatic villain on a chase across the U.S. “The Armageddon” has a much sillier plot, far more concerned with ancient orders and magical plot devices to gather. A minute's examination reveals the mythology the semi-sequel invents as nothing but a pretense. “Warlock: The Armageddon” is actually about putting Sands' campy villain in multiple different locations. He's in these places for the next Chaos Emerald he must gather. More importantly, though, he kills another person in each location in some crazy manner. If Hickox's “Waxwork” movies were mostly an excuse for wildly different set-pieces to occur within the same story, he applies a similar approach to what the first “Warlock” built.
Hickox's ADHD-like style, always bouncing from one idea to the next, is certainly not without its charms. “The Armageddon” exists to be a showcase for two things. First off, Julian Sands gets to ham it up in a variety of places and against multiple partners. He enters the movie nude and screeching, already vamping. At one point, he starts spewing green blood before Frenching a mechanic and stealing his replica of the General Lee. Later, he picks up a street-walker strictly to have another person to banter with and then gorily off. Which he does, spectacularly. Those murder scenes are highly entertaining and each is brought to life with inventively gooey creature effects. A sequence where the Warlock uses his seemingly limited ability to stretch a human being's body into a piece of modern art is easily the high-light of the entire film. Though the bubbling map he makes of torn-off human flesh is cool too. Through it all, there's Sands delighting in being a floating, campy figure of chaos.
Narrative coherence, thematic depth and characters with actual personalities have never been Hickox's strong suit. You can tell he had a lot of fun making “Warlock: The Armageddon” though. Gerry Lively's cinematography is colorful and frantic. A sequence set inside a roadside fun house is shot in psychedelic colors, featuring plenty of Raimi-ian camera movements, a distorted hall of mirrors, and some random rubber monsters. An earlier scene has Sands negotiating with a fashion designer atop a skyscraper that appears to be in Tim Burton's Gotham City. There are multiple shots adhered to people's faces as they fly backwards through the air in slow-motion. At one point, Sands – or his stunt double, more likely – leaps over the camera like he's in a kung-fu movie. There are multiple explosions and shoot-outs, sometimes with magical finger-guns. The art direction, production design, and visual composition have been stretched as far as possible to create a goofy, bloody, comic book-like tone of excess.
And it is a lot of fun, don't get me a wrong. A little more substance perhaps wouldn't have hurt though. While the original had the heroes trying to beat the bad guy to the last Dragon Ball, “The Armageddon” lives the good guys weirdly stationary and puts the villain on the move. Chris Young's teenage hero never actually meets Sands until the showdown at the end. Attempts are made to make the subplot about the Druidic order more complex. The small tow's pastor – played by Bruce Glover, R.I.P. Crispin's dad – used to be a Druid but left when he couldn't bring himself to kill his daughter. Despite knowing she'll come back to life. Considering we all know Sands' Warlock is the star of the show, it all strikes the viewer as an unnecessary attempt to add some conflict and depth to the script's other half. Young isn't a bad lead. The conflict with his dad, played by Steve Kahan is mildly interesting, but all the business with the Druids is an obvious load of nonsense. It's simply there to prepare us for the inevitable showdown and to fill time between the Warlock tearing shit up.
It is interesting that, despite its Abrahamic subtitle, “The Armageddon” casts Christian beliefs as impotent interlopers in the battle against evil. That the heroes are Druids, another branch of pre-Christian paganism, against the explicitly Satanic baddie surely says something about the spiritual mood in 1993. Perhaps it's another example of people seeking shelter in New Age corners after being failed by organized religion. Considering the movie also throws in runes, a Germanic thing, maybe the goofball script is simply a jumble of random semi-mystical ideas that were popular at the time. All of that aside, “Warlock: the Armageddon” is a fun piece of nineties monster movie hokum. It's a big step-down from the first but is still a suitably wild time. Creative direction, fun special effects, and an amusingly hammy leading man is sometimes all you need. [7/10]
To fans of the early days of cinema, when sound was new and film was in black-and-white, a familiar set of faces are carved upon the face of the Mount Rushmore of Horror. Mostly, it's the same three names that Universal Studios largely build their iconic legacy of monster movies upon: Lugosi, Karloff, and the Chaneys. This is probably true for classic film fans all over the world. However, countries around the world occasionally would attempt, within their own Hollywoods, to build their own Karloffs or Lugosis. A good example is Tod Slaughter. Slaughter got his start on-stage, becoming popular for productions in the Elephant and Castle region of London. He headlined many plays, in roles like Sherlock Holmes and D'Artagnan, but Slaughter would truly excel at playing villains. His most popular roles were William Burke and Sweeney Todd, causing Slaughter to boast that he had committed “15 murders on-stage a day.” Eventually, an attempt would be made to translate Slaughter's stage success to the silver screen, playing a lot of the same roles on-screen. While there was a token attempt to sell Slaughter's films abroad, they never caught on much in America. Nevertheless, recent restorations and Blu-Ray releases have made his work ripe for rediscovery. Why not pick a film from England's home-grown classic horror star to represent that country on my cinematic trip around the world?
Like most of Slaughter's starring roles, “It's Never Too Late to Mend” is a hoary melodrama, set in Victorian London and based on a penny novel from that period. Slaughter plays Squire John Meadows, an openly corrupt justice-of-the-peace. He covets Susan, the daughter of a poor farmer named Merton. Susan, however, is in love with the virtuous George Fielding. Determined to deal with his romantic rival, Meadows cooks up a phony charge of poaching to get George sent off to prison. George's buddy, Tom, swaps places with him so he'll go to jail in his place and George will go off on a trip to Australia. He writes to Susan all the time but the Squire intercepts his letters, making sure she never receives them. Slowly, he conspires to take the girl for his own. What pushes “It's Never Too Late to Mend” into the horror genre is that Squire Meadows is also on the board of governors at the local prison. There, he gleefully enacts a number of cruel punishments on the in-mates, delighting in torturing them far beyond the boundaries of what could be called a “justice” system.
If the above plot synopsis didn't make it abundantly clear, “It's Never Too Late to Mend” is about as stereotypical an old story of crime and punishment as you could possibly find. The characters are all exaggerated archetypes. Ian Colin's hero isn't merely a nice guy. He's as pure-hearted and good-natured as a human being as you could possibly imagine. Marjorie Taylor as Susan is such a perfectly virginal maiden as to have no other characteristics at all, existing as a symbol for the men in the story to conspire for. The story is full of improbable turns. Love triangles, mistaken identities, blackmail, and missing letters are all prominent plot points. Naturally, much of this information is conveyed via shouted declarations by the characters. People falling to their knees, begging and pleading for one thing or another, is not an uncommon sight here. Naturally, this means “It's Never Too Late to Mend” ends with the villain explaining his evil plot in detail after being found out. Meanwhile, the moral of the story – summed up in the title – is mentioned as often as possible too.
It is, to say the least, all rather hackneyed. Compared to the enormously atmospheric monster movies and thrillers that Universal cranked out in the twenties, thirties, and forties, the visual palette here is rather restrained. There's a cool tracking shot through an open door. A sequence in which a priest comforts a dying young boy in a jail cell, probably the movie's best, looks quite stylish. However, much of “It's Never Too Late to Mend” is rather beholden to its stage roots. There are many scenes of people standing around in rooms and talking. Music is not used that often, only being noticeable in a scene of Slaughter creeping around an empty bar. The sequences devoted to all that old English discipline will probably be of most interest to classic horror heads. A fifteen year old kid is locked in a steel bodice attached to a wall. Prisoners are dropped into a deep, dark hole for days on end. They are forced to turn heavy cranks endlessly. Seems to qualify as cruel and unusual punishment in my eyes, though it falls a bit short of “The Pit and the Pendulum” or the kind of shit Hjalmar Poelzig got up to in “The Black Cat.”
Through its admittedly short runtime of seventy minutes, the audience's attention is mostly kept on “It's Never Too Late to Mend” thanks to Slaughter's elaborate overacting. He is the very image of a stereotypical Bad Guy here. He wears the black overcoat and top hat. He lurks and hunches and schemes. He does indeed have a mustache and, yes, it should go without saying, he does twirl the ends of it. If I didn't know better, I would assume these cliches originated with Slaughter, that's how much he embodies them. From the minute he appears on-screen, Slaughter's character is obviously, blatantly evil. He smirks with absolute wicked glee as he talks about whipping prisoners and confining them to a black hole. The ending of “It's Never Too Late to Mend” features Slaughter cackling with insane abandon. That was simply inevitable.
I had previously seen Slaughter's version of “Sweeney Todd.” However, that was a long enough time ago that I have little to no memory of it. Consulting my old review shows that Slaughter's acting was quite over-the-top in that too. It would seem to me that Slaughter's films simply weren't as artistically shot or memorably poetic as the American monster stars he followed in the path of. However, the guy could tear up the scenery. No doubt about that. “It's Never Too Late to Mend” will probably prove equally forgettable, distinguished once again by its star's theatrical vamping. I don't think I'll be picking up that box set of his movies but I did get enough out of this one to probably watch another Tod Slaughter pic somewhere further down the line. [6/10]
Six hours in, “Alien: Earth” has abandoned all pretenses about its individual episodes having any sense of pacing at all. This show has simply become a game of watching the progress bar on its various plot threads load a little more. Wendy is slowly getting the hang of communicating with the xenomorph Prodigy has in captivity. Joe begins to plot out a scheme to help his sister escape the island. After Nibs' disturbing declaration that she was pregnant, the corporate brass talk the scientists into rebooting her memory to before the traumatic incident. The negotiations between Prodigy and Yutani fail, as no amount of billions sees Boy Kavalier willing to give up the aliens. Morrow continues to manipulate Slightly into allowing a warm body to meet a face-hugger. Isaac gets over-confident while dealing with the other alien specimens in the lab, leading to tragedy. A few of these wandering subplots meet up before the episode is over, tricking you into thinking all of this is going somewhere.
One of the elements people complained very, very loudly about with “Prometheus” was that the characters acted in a “stupid” manner. That a scientist poking a weird alien snake thing or a panicked character not thinking to run in a different direction was an unrealistic way for some one to act in a strange situation. There are pros and cons to these arguments. However, considering how lab-tested so much of Disney's franchise extensions are these days to appease internet complainers, you'd think they would avoid people doing stupid shit in their “Alien” series. Instead, “The Fly” has a character wandering into a laboratory full of bizarre, deadly creatures and, through a series of unlikely mistakes, getting trapped in a containment unit with one of the monsters. Certainly, human beings assuming they are at the top of the food chain and underestimating the capabilities of other creatures is a reoccurring idea across the “Alien” films. The implication of this scene in “The Fly” is that Isaac is woefully overestimating his own skills and abilities. However, the number of leaps one must make to accept the reality of this scene playing out are... Excessive.
The most pressing issue of all in “The Fly,” if not most of the episodes of “Alien: Earth,” has been if I actually cared about something happening to any of these characters. Wendy's outrage at Nibs having her memory edited to suit corporate needs is obviously a comment on how far trans-humanist concerns will inevitably conflict with technocratic goals. However, the script writers forgot to make the audience actually have any interest or investment in Nibs before beginning this development. Similarly, has Slightly ever had a purpose within this story line outside of being manipulated by Morrow? The advantage of television over film is that you have more time to flesh-out characters and explore their personalities. Instead, “Earth” having a large cast and multiple plot threads means everyone on this show is an idea that is simply stretched out as long as possible.
If we are not interested in what happens to these people, why am I watching “Alien: Earth?” I'm watching because I talked myself into an non-existent contract to review each episode. However, ostensibly, I'm watching because I'm a fan of the freaky monsters and sci-fi setting of the “Alien” movies. In that case, “The Fly” is also a failure. The little baby xenomorph Wendy chatters with is in a few scene. There's a tiny bit of Facehugger action at the very end. Otherwise, the monster quota in this episode is provided by the mutant sheep glaring from behind glass and an oversized space-insect puking acidic enzymes into someone's face. That bothers me because it seems to show a lack of imagination central to this entire program. When the iconic monster of a horror film is already famous for the acidic components of its bodily fluids, why would you add another creature with skin-melting spew? I don't know, you guys. My capability to not feel increasingly annoyed with this show is running thin. That point-of-view shot of the space-fly buzzing around a room was kind of cool, I guess. [5/10]
After directing Canadian horror films like “Funeral Home,” “Killer Party,” and “Blue Monkey” in the eighties, William Fruet would find steady work directing low-budget television shows filmed in the Great White North to save cash. That would include 27 episodes of “Goosebumps,” including the previously reviewed “Welcome to Dead House” and “Don't Look in the Basement.” Those were not complete dog-shit so I return to Fruet's work for my latest attempt to give “Goosebumps” a fair chance. “One Day at Horrorland” concerns the Morris family. A road trip to an amusement park called Zoo Gardens goes wrong when dad gets lost. Trapped in a car with no air conditioning, eldest child Lizzy and youngest child Luke are starting to get antsy. After being assaulted by fireballs on the road, the family begins seeing signs for an attraction called “Horrorland.” The kids beg to go, simply to get out of the car, and the parents reluctantly agree. The mostly abandoned park seems staffed entirely by horned monsters. The rides get the participants too close to real fear. When the family threatens to leave, they see a sign informing them that “No One Leaves Horrorland Alive.” The Morris brood is then ushered onto a soundscape, forced to participate in a game show run by more of these devilish ogres.
I've written before about the potency of the idea of a carnival, amusement park, or circus being used as a setting for a horror story. The contrast between engineered but safe thrills with decidedly not-so-safe thrills is fertile ground. There's exactly two moments in “One Day at Horrorland” that touches on some of these ideas. Shortly after arriving at Horrorland, the kids spot what appears to be a costumed performer holding a decapitated human head. The head then speaks, informing them not to go on the guillotine ride. Hey, that's a mildly gruesome, almost morbidly funny moment! Meanwhile, at the end of the first half-hour – this was originally a two-part episode – the family are faced with a locked gate and a sign reading “No Exit.” Aside from being a Sartre shout-out in a kid's show, the idea of entering a seemingly innocent seeming park, only to learn that you are trapped there forever... That's a genuinely nightmarish idea, by which I mean I've often had nightmares of entering a building only to be unable to leave it.
As is typical for “Goosebumps,” any potency “One Day at Horrorland” could have had is squandered by an excess of goofy bullshit and a total lack of any sense of danger. The cheapness of the program is unavoidable. All the Horrors are made up of two different types of green, horned, goblin masks. One is more expressive while the other is entirely still. The attractions that are supposedly so traumatizing to Lizzy and Luke do not strike me as especially intense. She is lead around a hall of mirrors that ends with her getting dropped through a trap door... To the outside of the fun house. The second ride is like a flume loglazy river ride, except in caskets. And that's entirely it! The game show sequence is mostly an excuse for half-assed jokes and bits. Such as an advertisement for a CD of monster-themed love songs. It seems to be building towards an actual grim climax, until a minor supporting character appears to save the family!
That is probably my biggest problem with “Goosebumps,” as an entire enterprise. The characters are ridiculously one-note and often obnoxious. Such as the obnoxiously stupid parents here or screeching little brother. However, the complete lack of any stakes to all these stories makes them essentially a series of scenes amounting to no meaning at all. Life or death is not necessary for a horror story to be effective. However, there has to be some reasons for this. When the Morris parents insist on participating with the monster-themed game show, because of the promise of a new car, that almost struck me as a commentary on greed. Instead, it simply because another phrase the script repeats over and over again. I know “Goosebumps” is a nostalgic favorite for some but I grew up with this show and these books too and I still think this shit blows ass. [4/10]
The perpetually underrated Olivia Hussey, who passed away in December of last year, of course got her big break as Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's classic adaptation of Shakespeare's timeless romance. However, this is not the film that ended up predicting the direction of her career. Rather, 1974's “Black Christmas” made the quiet, controlled Hussey into a scream queen. This preceded her appearing in many other off-beat genre projects. After the 1978 version of “The Cat and the Canary” and Kinji Fukasaku's “Virus” – but before “Quest of the Delta Knights,” “Ice Cream Man,” and playing Norman Bates' mom in “Psycho IV” – there was “Turkey Shoot.” Shot during a time when tax write-offs made Australia a hot spot for low budget productions, it was the fifth narrative film from the prolific director Brian Trenchard-Smith. Though English born, Trenchard-Smith would make a number of memorable films during this 10BA era. (So named for the division of Australia's Income Tax Assessment Act that made these productions possible.) That would make Trendard-Smith one of the names most associated with what would eventually be called Ozploitation. For Hussey, films like this were a far cry from the Bard but you take work where you can get it, I suppose.
Once again, global instability has led to an authoritarian regime seizing control of all of Earth's most powerful nations. Political undesirables, referred to as "deviants," are placed in prison camps and subjected to inhuman tortures. An especially brutal example is located near the Queensland coast of Australia. At Camp 47, Camp Master Thatcher invite the rich and powerful members of society to hunt the prisoners in what he calls a "turkey shoot." New arrivals at the camp include Paul Anders, a political activist arrested for broadcasting anti-government messages. He is joined by Chris Walters, an innocent young woman who merely stood up officers who were beating a man. Together with former sex worker Rita, the escape artist Griffin, and the visibly insane Dodge, the two are set loose in the near-by jungle. Over the next twelve hours, they will be hunted like animals by senators and millionaires armed with rifles, explosive crossbows, all-terrain vehicles, and at least one werewolf. Paul doesn't simply plan on surviving the turkey shoot. He plans on escaping and turning the tides against the fascist tormentors in power.
“Turkey Shoot” had a troubled production, its shooting schedule halved at the last minute. As a result, Trenchard-Smith cut the script down to the bare essentials. The result is a movie that wastes little time. Within minutes of meeting our heroes, everything we need to know about them is explained. The concept is quickly established. After a little torture and shower stall abuse, we are off to the man hunt. In order to make things as expedient as possible, the characters are simple. By which I mean they have one or two bizarre quirks. Steve Railsback is a never-say-die hero, Hussey is virginal in her innocence. John Ley makes Dodge an exceedingly bizarre, twitchy presence that adds a nervous energy to every scene he's in. Among the villains are Carmen Duncan as a sexually predatory lesbian who prefers to travel by horseback, a lunatic in a dune buggy named Tito, and Alph. Alph is some sort of evolutionary throw-back, with pointed teeth and claws, a hairy body, and yellow animalistic eyes. He likes to eat people's toes. Despite his beastly appearance and behavior, he's introduced wearing a top hat and bow tie. Why is there some sort of a dapper beast-man in this movie? Is he a result of post-nuclear war mutations of another sort? Tito says he's a “freak, found in a freak show.” No time is wasted on explaining why a wolfman is among the cast. You must simply accept that he is there.
This is the kind of motion picture “Turkey Shoot” is, a thoroughly outrageous experience much more interested in being memorable than being sensible. To fulfill that goal, Trenchard-Smith and his team fill the film with over-the-top violence. A machete to the head nearly splits a skull in half. A man is bisected at the waist with a shovel trowel. Bodies explode in a theatrical downpour of blood and brain matter. This is a film that decides its rape-y she-bitch villainess carrying a crossbow is insufficiently ridiculous. Instead, her arrows explode upon impact, to add an extra layer of pyrotechnics. To complete this tone of comic book-like silliness and excess, goofy looking vehicles and set designs are prominent throughout. Such campy looking costumes and props removes any doubt that “Turkey Shoot” knows exactly how ridiculous it is. The film is absolutely in on the joke.
The hit-the-ground-running pace and desire to always feature some silly, sleazy, or violent thing on screen means “Turkey Shoot” is thoroughly entertaining. That goes a long way to disguising that it's a movie widely made up of familiar pieces. The excessively sadistic prison guards, evil lesbian, and communal shower scenes all recall women-in-prison movies of years past. The sci-fi set-up is recycled from any number of familiar stories, freely mixing bits and pieces of “1984,” “Logan's Run,” “Rollerball,” and “Death Race 2000” with “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Great Escape.” In its last third, the film gives into the demands of action movie theatrics. By which I mean it becomes a repetitive series of shoot-outs and explosions, “Turkey Shoot” turning into a mini-war movie. The film goes fiery and large, when it should've been tightening up and focusing more on its “hunting humans” set-up.
Despite clearly being derivative of numerous films and stories that come before, and collapsing somewhat in its final reel, “Turkey Shoot” is too enjoyably loopy to be dismissed. The villains are thoroughly absurd. The violence is spectacularly over-the-top. The movie is insanely fast-paced, never having a single boring moment in it. Odd ball or extravagant inclusions tickle the synaptic nerves in my cult movie loving brain. Olivia Hussey reportedly had a dreadful time making the movie, terrified of the Australian wild life. The director was feuding with the producer – who was David Hemmings for some reason – all throughout. Out of such dire situations emerged a wildly entertaining B-movie geek show. “Turkey Shoot” suggests that any worn-out genre set-up can be improved by randomly including a monster-man and some dune buggy related violence. [7/10]
The found footage film has existed since at least 1961 but there's a reason the format didn't truly catch on until “The Blair Witch Project” in 1999. That movie was made by a bunch of nobodies, screwing around in the woods of Maryland, and it became a paradigm shifting blockbuster. "Paranormal Activity" had a similar impact. Both proved you didn't need elaborate special effects, recognizable stars, or a massive crew to make a scary flick that was also extremely profitable. That set-up must be especially appealing to filmmakers in countries without much of an established cinematic industry of their own. IMDb lists only 88 titles with the nation of Barbados as their primary hub of production. Locally made motion pictures have little international reach and the island does not seem to be as popular a filming location for Hollywood studios as other places in the Caribbean. Barbadian visual effects artist Stockton Miller had some viral success with a found footage style reel of a werewolf he made. Miller would team up with the Texas-based Thomas Burke – who seems to specialize in found footage and mockumentaries – around 2018 to start work on what would be the island nation's first feature length science fiction movie. Initially entitled "The Land We Call Home," it got picked up by Dread Central's distributing arm in 2022 and was slapped with the more direct title, "The Barbados Project." Well, let's take my Horror Around the World tour to a warmer climate tonight and see how we like this one.
In 2019, shaky cell phone footage of unidentified creatures lurking in the distance or emerging from the sea went viral around the country of Barbados. The videos prompted debate and skepticism but clearly something was going on. Journalist Reesa Price and her cameraman Alex decided to get to the bottom of these mysterious sightings. "The Barbados Project" compiles the declassified footage concerning their investigation and the surrounding events. The news crew uncovered a connection between the creatures and a local military contractor named Building Six. They interviewed a whistleblower claiming that the company had been doing weird experiments since the eighties. After encountering one of the beasts, Reesa begins to exhibit bizarre physical symptoms. The further into the conspiracy the crew went, the stranger it got.
The effectiveness of the found footage style is highly dependent on if the film can create a sense of realism. The intended illusion, after all, is that you are watching “real” recordings that the viewer has accidentally stumbled upon. “The Barbados Project,” unfortunately, does not pass this particular sniff test. This is largely because of the special effects. Within the opening minutes, we are presented with footage of some sort of giant monster wading through the ocean, off in the distance. It looks far too much like a GIF being dragged across the screen. Near the end, we see similarly shoddy CGI of dragon hovering in the air and breathing fire. It's simply not believable and, worst yet, the movie makes little attempt to disguise what we are looking at. When the primary monsters in the film appear – they look a lot like the Skullcrawlers from “Kong: Skull Island – they are right in the center of the screen, brightly lit. This not only removes any doubt in the viewer's mind that they are looking at a mediocre, computer generated creation. It also spoils the premise of the movie. How are we supposed to believe that there's any debate or skepticism about the existence of these creatures when they are clearly on-camera like this? That takes the idea from cryptozoology to regular zoology, ya know.
Aside from the deeply unconvincing visual effects, “The Barbados Project” fumbles immersion in other ways. In general, the acting is poor. As our journalist hero, Cerah Belgrave's line-reading is consistently stilted. What are supposed to be off-the-cuff conversations feel anything but, coming across more as awkward attempts to memorize dialogue the actors were given only a few moments to memorize. The actor playing the informant is easily the worst in the film, given reams of exposition to read and monotonously stumbling through it all, visibly glancing off-screen several times at presumed cue cards. In general, the writing in “The Barbados Project” is less than polished. It seems to me the filmmaker had a number of ideas but couldn't find a way to assemble them into a compelling whole. Instead, the film alternate between unexplained events – such as the biological effects encountering the monsters have on people – and flatly explaining story points that involve a lot of fuzzy sci-fi concepts. You get the impression of a script that was made up as filming went along.
Despite being advertised as the first feature length monster movie made in the titular country, “The Barbados Project” is barely over an hour long. Meaning it meets the Academy standard for a “feature film” by exactly one minute. Furthering my belief that the story was largely improvised, the plot line involving Reesa Price wraps up with about twenty minutes to go. The film then leaps into the future, to depict a TikTok video of a totally unrelated character resolving the narrative in his back yard. It's a moment that seems to be taking shot at internet content creators concerned only with upping their following count, totally at odds with a premise treated seriously up to that point. The movie leaps around formats like that a lot. Prior recordings, declassified government footage, and lots of flashy computerized menus appear around the primary footage telling the story. That goes hand-in-hand with an abuse of on-screen pixelization and scrambled footage. It's an interesting idea, a movie composed of snippets of different mediums like this. When combined with a haphazard script and shifty acting, it only furthers the impression that the filmmakers couldn't focus on one idea for very long.
One is tempted to take it easy on “The Barbados Project.” Clearly much of the team were amateurs getting their big break. One assumes that resources were limited, given the lack of support for film productions in their country. Considering Stockton Miller's background in special effects, I imagine he did most of the digital work himself. Getting a movie finished and released is hard work and many factor determine the outcome. There were clear ambitions here but whatever resources were available fell far short of them. The truth of the matter is that there's simply nothing much effective about what we see here. The result is less thrills and chills and more secondhand harassment for everyone involved. The feeling is more akin to watching a randomly assembled YouTube video than a professional production, thoroughly ineffective and underwhelming in every way. Best of luck to everybody who worked on this on all their future endeavors though. I know it's hard out there. [3/10]
Ray Bradbury was rather stuck on the idea of the government banning and burning books. Aside from “Fahrenheit 451,” he also explored the idea in “The Exiles” – in which the ghosts of banned authors manifest on Mars – and “Usher II.” The latter was adapted into a season four episode of “The Ray Bradbury Theater.” In the future, a government agency known as the Moral Climates has banned all tales of the fantastic and macabre. An eccentric millionaire named William Stendahl has spent most of his fortune constructing a replica of the House of Usher, as described in Edgar Allan Poe's story. He has populated it with life-like androids, playing the roles of witches and monsters. Moral Climates' Mr. Garrett sends a robot doppelganger of himself to investigate, which Stendahl replaces with his own. This copy invites the head council of the Moral Climates to a costume party at the new House of Usher. There, they watch as apparent robotic copies of themselves fall victim to grisly scenarios from Poe's stories. That's when Stendahl invites the real Garrett, who has already ordered the destruction of this new House of Usher, down into the wine cellar to taste some fine amontilado sherry...
At various points in his dotage, Mr. Bradbury would bitch about political correctness or claim “Fahrenheit 451” was actually about how bad television is. There are signs of this in “Usher II.” Stendahl claims that the roots of the current oppressive government were civil rights organizations demanding the censoring of “offensive” content. Great futurist though he was, Bradbury couldn't imagine the current state of affairs. Where knowledge is not control by information being limited but rather by the public being inundated with it, a deluge of non-stop distraction and insincere lies burying actual truths. That timelines would pile horrors upon horrors, in-between mindless advertisements, to deaden our drive to pursue what was right. That corporations would further the destruction of true wisdom not by burning books but by burning forests, to replace actual imagination with dead-eyed simulacra vomited out by mindless machines. I know we've all had fun dunking on pearl-clutching fuddy-duddies from time to time but it gulls me a bit that someone as clearly intelligent and observant of the human condition as Ray Bradbury would blame “political correction” for the denigration of actual knowledge than the businessmen and billionaires.
But there I go being a grousing old man myself. What about “Usher II?” Patrick Macnee, John Steed himself, plays Mr. Stendahl as someone who delights in the theatrical. He invents this elaborate scheme mostly to take revenge on the people he's despised. Because why merely murder someone when you can build an actual House of Usher and have them shoved up the chimney by a mechanical orangutan? (Of which the aftermath we only see here, presumably for budgetary reasons.) As his rival, Stuart Devenie – later seen as the kung-fu fighting priest who shouts “I kick ass for the lord!” in Peter Jackson's “Dead Alive” – is equally despicable. A dead-faced fascist, who takes a cold sadistic pleasure in punishing “immoral” behavior, is probably the kind of people who deserve to get walled up alive. Watching these two bounce off each other, especially once Stendahl goes about recreating “A Cask of Amontilado,” is quite entertaining on its own. The final accusation, that cultural critics blame society's woes on media they don't bother actually reading or watching themselves, sure sounds pointed coming out of Macnee's lips.
“Usher II” was directed by Lee Tamahori, a few years before “Once Were Warriors” and a decent run of thrillers later in the decade. (And long before he pivoted to very loud dreck like “Die Another Day” or “xXx: State of the Union,” the kind of movies ol' Ray probably would've hated.) Alongside cinematographer Warrick Attewell and production designer Rick Kofoed, they make sure the titular haunted abode looks amazing. Lots of gothic arches, shadowy corridors, spider web strewn staircases, and moonlight peering through wide windows. I'm not sure the episode is making nearly as much of a point about the attitudes that make censorship possible as it thinks. It seems much more about Bradbury enacting some suitably ironic revenge on anyone who dares to burn books. All the business with androids and robotic copies seems ultimately unnecessary, in service of a twist ending that is very easy to see coming. I do, however, totally understand the impulse to live out the rest of your life in a dusty old haunted castle. That may, in fact, be my greatest ambition in life. The house of Usher has fallen. Long live the House of Usher. [7/10]
Once more, “The Addams Family” writers' room uses Wednesday and Pugsley as springboards for a story without actually involving them in the plot much. The Addams children report to their parents that a recent incident involving blasting caps has gotten them in trouble at school. Disappointed that an educational facility would stifle their kids' creativity, Gomez and Morticia immediately set out finding a private academy for their offspring. Sam Hillard – last seen running for office after being a truant officer – is now the head administrator at Mockridge Hall. At first, Hillard wants nothing to do with the Addams but Gomez' generous offer has him changing his mind. Pugsley and Wednesday immediately get expelled for bringing their pet octopus and Gila monster to class. Morticia and Gomez' solution to that is to simply buy the school outright, ousting Hillard and bringing their typically eccentric approach to the curriculum. This outrages the parents of the regular students, who demand Hillard's return
“Addams Cum Laude” – a title that sounds less unfortunate than it looks – does exactly what we expect from this show by now. Which is to say it's an episode devoted to the Addams' creepy and kooky antics being more than the average folks can handle. This is most evident in the sequence when Hillard visits 0001 Cemetery Drive and is presented with Addams' plans for the school syllabus. However, I do think the script here cooks up a few good variation on the familiar gags. Uncle Fester supplements his usual light bulb trick with a new ability involving a record player, which is amusingly stretched out. When Gomez hears Morticia speaking French, he accidentally grabs the arm of another woman instead, which is a good bit. In general, there are some inspired silliness here. Gomez practices his polo skills on a stationary bike, which then whinnies like a horse. Lurch pops into the room before Morticia rings the gong, startling her slightly. That made me chuckle, if only because Carolyn Jones' facial expression is priceless. Also, I am more convinced than ever that Thing can teleport, as he appears in Mr. Hilard's desk to comfort him unexpectedly.
A fairly standard installment of “The Addams Family” but it does present one of the sharper bits of social commentary in this old series. Hillard is reluctant to get involved with the Addams at first, being well aware of their eccentricities by now. The minute Gomez starts counting a huge stack of money, however, the principal changes his mind. Yes, the all mighty dollar sees a member of polite society reconsidering his previously firmly held beliefs. You can read a little deeper into the set-up here too. The Addams devote their lives to pursuing their passions, which makes them happy. The standard American school system tries to force kids down a specific path. When Gomez and Morticia attempt to transform a standard academy in their own vision, the parents who pay the tuitions demand an immediate return to conformity. Despite the Addams' new system actually being far more profitable for the school, as the ending reveals. Oh, if only we were all as rich as the Addams and could spend our days worshiping our hot goth wives and blowing up toy trains... [7/10]
Since the characters became millionaires at the end of “Fast Five,” there's really been no narrative reason for the “Fast & Furious” franchise to roll on. Not that anyone is making these movies for the art, at this point. “Furious 7” made it into the billion dollar club, completely insuring that we'd be getting more of these ridiculous spectacles. F. Gary Gray, right off the success of “Straight Outta Compton,” was recruited to steer yet another entry in this turbo-charged series. The amusingly entitled "The Fate of the Furious" would roar into theaters in April of 2017. It would be another massive hit, also grossing over a billion dollars at the international box office. Depending on who you ask though, this is when the wheels start to fall off the “Fast” machine.
While on their second honeymoon in Havana with Letty, Dom is approached by a mysterious woman known only as Cipher. Meanwhile, Luke Hobbs recruits the rest of the gang to capture a EMP device from an extremist faction in Europe. That's when Dom appears, turns on his make-shift family, and steals the EMP. Mr. Nobody pulls the familiar players together to figure out what has happened and defeat Cipher. Hobbs ends up in jail with Shaw, the two eventually busting out together and joining the mission. Nobody knows the reason Dom is working for Cipher: She has the son he didn't know existed and is blackmailing him to be part of her terrorist plot to take over the world.
As has often been joked about and referenced, “family” has emerged as the uniting theme of the latter-day “Fast” movies. Having Dom switch sides, seemingly betraying his family (but actually out of further obligation to them), pushes that idea further. It's also the exact kind of comic book style plotting I've come to expect from this increasingly far-fetched universe. However, there's a problem with inserting such a standard “What if the good guy switches side?” set-up. Without the fatherly figure of Dom Toretto to head this familia, things begin to feel a bit aimless. Forcing Vin Diesel back into the stoic tough guy mode he started in robs him of his charm. He seems so checked-out through large parts of this movie, one scene further removing his humanity by placing him in bulky armor and a mask, like a car-driving Jason Voorhees or Iron Man. Turning Dom into a traitor sullies the hang-out movie vibes that propels this series.
That story turn also represents another clear phenomenon: Writer Chris Morgan starting to run out of ideas. Plot ranks somewhere around the level of catering in importance to these films. However, there's no denying that the story is a mess. The exact nature of the world-endangering MacGuffin seems to change from scene-to-scene sometimes. It's obviously nothing more than a plot device to get the crew from one set piece to the next. The finale takes place in a Siberian submarine port overtaken by some other occupying forces, one example of the kind of plot points that come at the audiences nearly as fast as the cars do. Dom asking a favor of a mysterious new character or the sudden appearances of jet packs are other examples. The vehicular mayhem has always led the rest of the plot around in these movies. The action scenes driving the story, instead of the other way around, starts to feel like a problem.
Despite the tangled mess of a screenplay and a number of questionable narrative choices, “The Fate of the Furious” still works when centering its hyper-macho cast of goofy bros. I'm not talking about Tyrese's Rome, who becomes more annoying and inessential with every film, or Michelle Rodriguez' Letty, dragged along by the plot. Instead, the cock-measuring contest between Dwayne Johnson's Hobbs and Jason Statham's Shaw is definitely the highlight of the film. The constant trash-talking between these two, which immediately escalates to homoerotic tension and then mutual respect, is highly amusing. That's what you get when you paired two physical titans with gallons of charm against each other. That unexpected cameo also proves that letting extremely charming performers bounce off each other is the real strength of these films.
That brings me to the action sequences. There are definitely some good moments. Rodriguez gets a good one-on-one fight with a goon, that ends in a nicely grisly way. Statham and Johnson's escape from cyber-jail features their respective fighting styles – brute force and parkour – contrasting nicely. Statham is at the center of the film's other best moment, where he has to kill lots of creeps while protecting a baby.
The movie actually peaks early as far as its vehicular stunts go. The opening street race, where Dom pushes a jalopy way past its limit, is by far the best car moment in the film. Later scenes, such as when Cipher's super-hacking turns every thing with wheels into a weapon, feel a bit desperate. This franchise falling to its need to make cars the currency of every action scene. (Dom managing to kill a submarine with a muscle car is the normal level of desperate for this series.) The extremely long climax, and the unending vehicular mayhem it involves, started to bore me quickly. Explosions and twisted metal aren't enough sometimes.
You don't see much of F. Gary Gray's personal style in this one. A rare dutch angle or some smooth cinematography for a few seconds is about all you get. Otherwise, macho melees, CGI chaos, and lots of pyrotechnics characterizes this installment. Even when those moments are effectively done, “The Fate of the Furious” feels a bit self-conscious about its desire to always top itself and earlier entries. That's led to a scrambled script and repetitive action that too often puts the best elements in the backseat. [6/10]
